Adam R Brown

I’ve just installed the spankin’-new wavatars plugin, and it has my vote for plugin of the year.

Wavatars are an extension of the gravatars concept, but a dramatic improvement. So here’s the backstory:

In the bad old days, if you wanted to put an image (an “avatar”) next to your comments on somebody’s blog, you would have to upload your avatar to that blog. You would have to repeat this process at every blog you visited. As such, avatars were a major pain in the rear, so nobody supported them on their blog.

Then, gravatars came along, with a simple concept: When people comment at your blog, they leave an email address–why not convert that email address into an image? That way, you can just upload an image of your choice to gravatar.com , and whenever you post a comment on any gravatar-enabled blog (like this one), your avatar will show up automatically.

Gravatars were an awesome concept, and they’ve been slowly catching on for the past several months, especially since automattic bought gravatar.com . If you look through comments on this blog, you’ll see that between 25% and 50% of my commenters have created gravatars for themselves.

But turn that math around, and you’ll see the problem with gravatars: Between 50% and 75% of my commenters don’t have a gravatar. So instead of a little picture next to their comment, they get the default gravatar, which is booorrring.

Solution: Wavatars. If you don’t have a gravatar, no problem: The wavatars plugin will convert your email address into a randomly generated avatar. It’s easy to tell wavatars from gravatars on my blog–the wavatars are the cartoony-looking polygons with faces.

What I want to see next: I’d like to see the gravatar folks purchase the wavatars concept and implement it by default. That way, we would need only gravatars and not need the wavatars plugin. This has several benefits. These are the biggies:

• Gravatars get served from gravatar.com’s fast servers; wavatars, on the other hand, use up my server’s bandwidth
• Gravatars are cached on gravatar.com’s servers; wavatars get cached on my server, using up my storage space

Plus, if wavatars were offered by gravatar.com, they could have several different “theme” packs of wavatars that website owners could choose from.

So, how about it, gravatar.com?